Can the Mountains Speak for Themselves?

Thomas James

Colorado Outward Bound School

1980

Several years ago, a course director named Rustie Baillie
coined the phrase, "Let the mountains speak for themselves". He was
reacting against pressures in the Colorado Outward Bound School to
verbalize student experience on courses and to use counseling techniques
to manage the group process of patrols. Baillie was not the first to
react. In interviewing staff and trustees from the early years of Outward
Bound in this country, I discovered that the issue was as vehemently
debated then as it is today. In fact, the debate began right after the
first season in 1962 when there was a falling out about whether to instill
an "intellectual element" in courses, and since then there have been
plenty of historical examples of the rift. In 1964 the school director
required nightly staff debriefings on the meaning of each day’s activities
in the base camp at Marble, and one staff member of those years told me
that instructors breathed a sigh of relief when it came time to go on the
six-day alpine expedition. In 1966 the chief climbing instructor tried to
introduce a written guide to counseling techniques. In 1967 or so there
started to be readings and other written materials available for use in
the field. By the next year there was an outline to help foster spiritual
awareness.

In the years since then there have been other examples of the
urge to intensify the counseling, teaching and therapeutic aspects of
working for Outward Bound. For those who were not sympathetic it was all
cant and crud they had to clear away to run a straightforward Outward
Bound course. For those who were sympathetic, the school’s support for
this kind of skill was not anywhere near adequate. Many felt, and still
feel today, that there would have to be a great expansion of human
relations techniques in Outward Bound before the program could offer its
students personal growth that would transfer to their lives back home.

The issue has been around long enough to make me conclude that it is
one of those defining tensions that is built into the identity of Outward
Bound and will never go away. At the risk of offending many people who
have strong feelings and a lot of their own lives wrapped up in the issue,
I am going to summarize a few perspectives that I have heard or witnessed.
I will add a couple of thoughts of my own, for whatever they might be
worth to others. Finally, I will sum up the issue in a way that I hope
will be conducive to further discussion among staff. The purpose of this
paper is not to fix one point of view as right and good. It is merely to
give others some tools for thinking about their own roles as Outward Bound
instructors. I hope my thoughts will be a stimulus to continue the
discussion wherever it may lead, not to end it or demand a certain
outcome.

To begin with, it seems to me that the people who are saying anything
equivalent to "Let the mountains speak for themselves" are also saying
something more, which is that instructors can rely on the overall
structure of the Outward Bound course to give their students a good
experience. They can rely on a training sequence, a way of grouping
students and committing them to task performance, activities like solo and
the rappel etc. In an evening discussion on Kurt Hahn last winter, course
director Chris Brown put it well when he said that no matter what else
might be added on, he always comes back to the tried and true activity
structure of the course. The rappel works; the expedition
teaches; solo asks the questions that need to be asked.

So the point is not exactly that the mountains do the teaching. It is
that the training sequence we are using is a remarkably effective way to
help people to learn in the mountains. When it is applied in a
straightforward way, then the mountains, which we might as well translate
to mean "Necessity" or "Natural Process" , do in fact teach their valuable
lessons to all who are willing to make the effort.

This is what Jon Waterman was driving at in the last Staff Newsletter
when he said that "a patrol’s experiences need relatively little
‘instructor facilitation’ in the realm of an intensive twenty-two day
mountain expedition". The experience happens naturally if instructors are
skilled enough to take their students safely through the adventurous
activities that make up Outward Bound, and when they do that, the
mountains are extraordinary teachers indeed. From what I have been able to
gather as a newcomer to Outward Bound, this is what the British
instructors have generally represented in the Outward Bound movement in
America: strong, taciturn, no-nonsense mountaineers who look like the type
who have saved lives and mastered impossible situations, but who would
never want to make a big deal about it. They want students to know by
experience. They want to keep other activities and "head trips" from
hampering the direct experience of mountain wilderness, teacher
extraordinaire.

Having said that much - and I think it is obvious that much more could
be said - I want to add only two points about this perspective. To begin
with, on the positive side, mountaineering per se is an activity
that requires a high degree of consciousness and self-scrutiny. The same
is true, I believe, of river running. Sometimes it is tempting for
educators and psychological buffs to depict the action side of Outward
Bound as devoid of reflection, when in fact that life of actions is often
composed of mental activity of the most significant kind. As I see it, the
so-called "rock jocks" are not pushing a low-consciousness activity. From
an educational standpoint, I would interpret their point of view to be
saying that the learning that takes place naturally and integrally on an
Outward Bound course does not need elaborate verbalization and testing in
a controlled group process in order to be conscious, useful and
transferable.

On the negative side, letting the mountains speak for themselves means
that the staff may be transmitting little culture and few values other
than those of mountain living and expeditions. There is a danger, cited by
a staff member in another Outward Bound school a few years ago, that this
kind of teaching could amount to saying, "We are the people and this is
the life." The lesson then would be one of self-absorption: "We are a
strong, beautiful, alienated elite that treasures above all else this
lifestyle and these awesome mountains. Don’t you want to be like us?" I am
putting the argument in an extreme form to make a point. There may not be
a single person in the whole Outward Bound movement who exemplifies the
extreme. But there cannot help be some tendency that way in anyone who
loves the mountains and is young. Moreover, in a program in which formal
ideology is to teach through the mountains and not for them,
any instructor worth his/her salt is going to assume that you have to do a
lot of teaching for before you have a safe and adventurous context
to teach through. Yet, if the learning ends at mountain living,
then is it not at least debatable whether the life-stylist may have given
their students short shrift?

Usually during the past year when I have heard people talking about
this issue, they put "rock-jocks" (or some more or less derogatory phrase)
on one side and "touchy feelies" on the other. I hope I have said enough
about the former so that anyone who is not sympathetic to them will take a
fresh look at their point of view, perhaps seeing in a new light the
excellences and depths of human response that they are capable of bringing
to an Outward Bound course. Similarly, I hope that what I am about to say
on the other side will give pause to those who are intent on letting the
mountains speak for themselves, a pause long enough to consider why some
people might want to explore other possibilities on a course. One
surprising discovery I made this year while researching the history of the
Colorado Outward Bound school was that student impressions of courses are
remarkably consistent even where different styles of instruction were
involved. It seems that all kinds of instructors can impel students into a
good Outward Bound experience. This suggests to me that no one has a
corner on the best way to do Outward Bound. Ultimately, the
differences do not represent conflict so much as they reflect creativity.
What this says to me is that no one stands to lose from greater
communication and a wider range of sympathies.

So why do some people want to spend more time verbalising the
experiences of students on an Outward Bound course? If we ask this
question, we might as well also ask another one: Why has this school,
which was originally staffed mostly by mountaineers and ex-military men,
drawn so many educators and social worker types since the mid-1960s? The
answer to the latter question is that these people have found an intensity
of learning and being in Outward Bound that usually does not exist in
conventional institutions. Isn’t this what has brought us all to Outward
Bound? But they also look for a connection between that intensity and the
life to which students return. This is really what is meant by teaching
through the mountains and not for them. And this is why, in the
model developed by Vic Walsh and Jerry Golins, and also the similar one
developed by Ron Gager, to explain the learning process of Outward Bound,
they say that the outcome of the stress, challenge and mastery in an
unfamiliar environment should be to reorient the meaning and direction of
the learner’s life experience. Direct experience is the key, but there
must be some way to help the student beyond immediate consumption of
experiences to the greater challenges of improving their lives back home.
The usual label is "transference", helping students to transfer their
newfound competence and confidence back to an environment that may not
sustain them so excitingly as Outward Bound did.

The people who talk about education and personal growth and group
process are not denying that challenge and adventure are the bedrock of
Outward Bound. They are not seeking verbalization and reflections
instead of action, but in addition to action, as an enhancement
and not as a substitute. Now, as I did with other perspectives, I’d like
to make only two additional points here, one positive and one negative,
though of course there is much more than could (and I hope will) be said.

On the positive side, the verbalising point of view is sensible because
it reflects the way most people go about learning and making changes in
their lives. I will first say what I mean by this in the abstract; then I
will describe how it might appear on a course in the field. In the
abstract (and please bear with me if you are not sympathetic to this kind
of talk about Outward Bound), educators are apt to follow John Dewey’s
notion that the challenge of any form of education is to select present
experiences that will live fruitfully and creatively in future experience.
Few would disagree with this. Dewey, who was probably the greatest
educational thinker ever produced in this country, wrote of learning as an
experiential continuum, a continuity of growth experiences. But here is
where the disagreement begins, because he characterized learning not as
the experience itself, but as thinking about experience. So a form of
education like Outward Bound that provides intense experiences also needs
to provide tools for thinking about those experiences, for tying what has
happened on a course into the experiential continuum of those who have
passed through it. Another equally abstract way of saying this comes from
social scientists who have studied learning behaviour and concluded that
the experience of the learner must be generalized into the learner’s
repertoire of skills and knowledge. Students need help to draw inferences,
to see the pattern that connects their continuous experience. And this is
precisely why we have schools, even those as informal and far-flung as the
Colorado Outward Bound School.

In a less abstract vein, the process of thinking about experience
doesn’t have to be either a church social or a Mazola party. It can be as
integral to the experiences as is skills instruction, if handled
skillfully It might be only a well-placed word here or there on a course,
some perspective on nutrition or safety or physical exercise, a sincere
but non-judgmental suggestion of the possibilities back home, perhaps just
an openness to someone who is thinking out loud about the past - and
beyond this, some knowledge of things that work in helping students to
reflect on their experience. This could be as simple as an initiative game
or as elaborate as an intensive journal, depending on the circumstances.
It could be a chat about energy use while doing the dishes or a nightlong
rap on philosophy and previous lives around glowing embers. As in the
teaching of skills, it is crucial to maintain the pace and authenticity of
the experience, not interrupting adventure with contrived interactions.
But the process of thinking about experiences does not have to be
contrived, though I suspect it does require more energy from instructors
than they would have to put out for a straightforward expedition with no
extras.

Much of what the educators and personal growth advocates are talking
about is remarkably similar to what all instructors are trying to do in
their own way. In a recent paper on working with small groups, Candice
Chrislip described it as helping student "to isolate a particular success
on the course, to identify the process they went through, and to make this
success available to them as a future resource". Although I must admit to
a bias in that direction because I am an educator in my own values, I
still would find it hard to argue on any ground that her statement was not
central to Outward Bound. And the more tools we have for carrying it out,
the better.

On the negative side, it may be pretentious to expect that Outward
Bound can do any more than give its students what course director Ron
Gager has called a "short-term turn-on". The standard course is only
twenty-three days long. Instructors have no formal training in counseling,
therapy, communications, human relations etc. In fact, what instructors
are trained to do is let the mountains speak for themselves by guiding a
patrol into the wilderness, building up its skills for outdoor living, and
then confronting it with a characteristic set of problem-solving tasks.
Students coming to Outward Bound are looking for this very thing. For the
most part they will not ask of more (especially the adolescents).
Certainly there are very few who are ready to give the profound emotional
assent and perseverance that is required for therapeutic healing in any
meaningful sense beyond the "short-term turn-on". Most are looking for
action and they want more than anything to learn that they can do
more than they thought they could. What I am driving at is that the
mountaineers are making an important point by demanding a more limited set
of expectations for an Outward Bound course. Perhaps that point is that we
should do what we do best, which is to deliver students into an
extraordinary experience of action and adventure, leaving them to make of
it what they will. We can provide the spark, as Kurt Hahn said, but it is
up to others to keep the flame alive.

Obviously, the dichotomy or "defining tension" I have described is too
simple. Everyone is in the middle somewhere, partaking of both sides, but
I hope what I have said will be useful in firing up others to think about
the possibilities of Outward Bound. It may be that someone who has been a
hard-core skills person for a few courses will find it interesting to
experiment with new techniques in human relations, just to keep the job
interesting and find out why people make such a fuss over "touchy feely".
On the other hand, for those who came fresh from highly verbalized
settings and are ready to charge into the millennium of human potential,
it might be interesting to ease off for a bit and savour the excitement of
Outward Bound in its most austere and economical form. Meanwhile, the
school will probably continue to do what schools always do in staff
development, which is to push people to build up the complementary side of
their skills and knowledge, either to strengthen hard skills if they are
weak in that area, or to soften up a bit if they are so hard as to be
antisocial. Hooray for our differences!